A matter of record

Documenting small, regional languages can help them to not only
survive, but thrive.

Research locations don't come much more attractive than Vanuatu. But it is
not the crystal waters and palm-fringed beaches that continue to draw Dr
Catriona Malau back to the archipelagic nation in the South Pacific.

Malau, a researcher with the Endangered Languages Documentation, Theory and
Application Group within the Faculty of Education and Arts, is a linguist with a
special interest in island languages spoken in Vanuatu. For her, the allure of
the country is its linguistic diversity - with approximately 100 languages
spoken by a population of about 255,000 - and the challenge presented by
learning, understanding and deciphering those languages.

"It is the excitement of discovering how a language works, and being the
first to document and grammatically analyse it," Malau says. "The island
languages of Vanuatu are all related but there is surprising variation between
each of them, which makes them quite fascinating to study."

For her PhD studies, undertaken through the Australian National University,
Malau wrote and published a grammatical description of the North-east Ambae
language, spoken on the island of Ambae in the north of Vanuatu. For the past 10
years she has been systematically documenting another of the country's
languages, Vurës, which is spoken by about 1,500 people on the island of Vanua
Lava.

Since 2006, her research has been supported by Germany's Volkswagen
Foundation, which funds studies of minority languages through a philanthropic
program called DoBeS (an acronym for Dokumentation Bedrohter Sprachen
or Documentation of Endangered Languages).

Malau deposits her data and translations in a publicly available digital
archive on the DoBeS website and is progressively writing a web-based multimedia
dictionary of the language. The multidisciplinary research project has also
involved a marine biologist, botanist, anthropologist and ethnomusicologist, who
have contributed their expertise to identifying and describing aspects of the
island environment and culture. A German researcher works in partnership with
Malau, documenting Vera'a, another language spoken by a smaller collective of
people on the same island.

To learn and understand a language in its cultural context, linguists must
immerse themselves in the communities they study.

"Most of the data from field trips comes from recordings of people telling
traditional stories or speaking in different situations," Malau says. "To hear
the language as they use it you need to be an active observer by participating
in village activities, going to their ceremonies, working alongside them and
generally living as they do."

Malau met her husband on Vanua Lava, so her field trips these days have a
personal as well as academic purpose, but she says the people on the island have
always welcomed her and supported her work.

"While English and French are the languages of education in Vanuatu, the
Indigenous languages are a vital part of their cultural identity and research of
this nature gives credibility to the language and lifts its status," she
says.

"Linguists can make a real contribution to communities by encouraging
maintenance of their language and helping to ensure its longevity."